Reacting to a “sense of disaffection” following the inability of the Obama administration to offer a progressive solution to the financial crisis of 2008, a 2019 New York Times profile on Lauren Berlant describes how she saw Americans growing emotionally unsteady. “It was as though were in relationships that lacked reciprocity,” profiler Hua Hsu says. “[C]onsider our Twitter-fed swings of anger and mirth, the oversharing and moodiness ascribed to younger generations, the paranoia stoked by proliferating conspiracy theories, even the emergence of the eternally sad pop star.” This seminar will offer an introduction to the politics of affect, the inscription by cultural and political ideologies of what Benedict Spinoza called our “capacity to affect and to be affected.” We will not only consider how this capacity operates as a site of struggle, but also how it operates intersectionally, in terms of what Jasbir Puar has called the “differential normalities” of biopolitical societies; how it circulates us within cultural and political milieus, pointing to what Sarah Ahmed calls a “sociality of emotion;” how it entangles us with our environment, suggesting what Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino call an “affect-environment confluence;” and how it is intensified technologically, by what Tero Karppi calls the “affective flow” of scrolling through Facebook. The final design of the course will be structured to appeal to both students in literary studies and in rhetoric and composition. Requirements include a major project, whether seminar paper, pedagogical intervention, or digital project; and two presentations during the semester.
Selections to be taken from the following list:
- Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?
- Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret
- Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
- Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
- Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.
- Eve Sedgewick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
- Casey Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice
- Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
- Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds
- Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect
- Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino, eds. Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment
- Sianne Ngai, Ugly Emotions
- Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion
- Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
- Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
- Tero Karppi, Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds
Roger Whitson 